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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Hewitt and Giuliani

By The Daily Dish
Nov 13 2007, 2:20 AM ET

He's hedging his bets, I'd say. But can one ask what this means:

A Giuliani presidency would be drama-filled and certainly unpredictable in many ways. But there would be no going wobbly in the war. Period.

It seems to me that, at this point in the game, we really do need a president who can articulate a strategy against Jihadist terror that does not fall into some inane binary of "wobbly" vs "non-wobbly." What would non-wobbly mean? The argument for attacking Iran, for example, is an extremely difficult one - and a case could well be made that such an attack would actually set us back in the long war. The same can be said for the terrible p.r. effects of the torture and detention policies that Giuliani supports. And the even deeper toll on America's reputation abroad if he were to be elected. Have we not learned from Iraq that simply having an aggressive posture does not translate to success unless we have thought through strategy and tactics and diplomacy very, very carefully? I see no evidence of such thought in Giuliani's campaign - or, indeed, in any of the Republican campaigns so far. The recitation of "strength" does not make a person strong.



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